Founder publicly admits fault: Base App officially surrenders, Coinbase on-chain social dream shattered

Ta Zhu, Golden Finance

Summary: Base APP’s creator-content token route, which it promoted for a full year, has failed. Base’s future long-term roadmap prioritizes trading, payments, and AI agents, and its internal resources are currently focused on the trading segment. Base APP’s return signals a shift from the “super app” fantasy to a positioning as financial infrastructure.

I. Base App surrenders; the SocialFi route doesn’t work

On July 15, 2026, Base’s founder Jesse Pollak did something extremely rare across the entire crypto industry: he publicly admitted he was wrong. Pollak announced that he would no longer lead Base App. His bet—that leveraging on-chain social experiences could mainstream crypto—had simply proven to be unworkable.

In my view, our bet on builders was right, but our bet on social was clearly wrong. Builders have indeed driven the next wave of crypto adoption—prediction markets, perpetual futures, stablecoins—but social hasn’t been at the center. In fact, many of the markets’ocial components we’ve all been working to build—Farcaster, Zora, Miniapps, and creator incentives—completely fell apart. I was wrong—whether the timing was wrong ($ansem 算创作者币吗？) or whether it was fundamentally wrong, only time will tell, but in any case, I am wrong.

Pollak handed leadership of Base App to Jordan Fish. Fish is a more widely known name in crypto circles—Cobie (Note: Coinbase acquired the Echo platform last year for about $375 million, and Fish therefore joined Coinbase). It’s important to note that Pollak adjusted Base App’s development direction, not abandoning Base, the L2 network. Instead, he said that in the future he will put more effort into building Base as infrastructure for a “global financial blockchain,” re-centering on Base’s “global financial blockchain” positioning.

During Pollak’s tenure, Base App had a certain degree of independent operational authority. Under the new product plan, Base App was brought back under its parent company Coinbase’s jurisdiction.

Over the past two years, Base App had been betting on developing developer and on-chain native social experiences, including Farcaster, Zora, mini apps, and creator tokens. It believed these would drive the next wave of crypto growth and aimed to use these approaches to onboard crypto to “one billion users.”

However, the real outcomes fell short of expectations.

Over the past year, Base APP devoted substantial resources to the creator economy, hoping to build a new user-growth flywheel through on-chain content, social relationships, and token incentives. The most representative attempt was built around “creator content tokens.” The plan aimed to let everyday users, content creators, and community members capture value by issuing tokens, shifting social interaction from traditional platforms’ traffic distribution model to tokenized on-chain assets. But this concept ultimately failed to generate the expected network effects.

In December 2025, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero announced that the platform would undergo a major strategic adjustment: it would abandon the path of seeking product-market fit with “social-first” for more than four years, and instead pivot to a wallet-centered growth model. This February, Base APP ended the creator rewards program and the Farcaster-supported social information feed.

As Pollak posted on X to announce Base’s new business plan, this experiment in Web3 social ultimately ended with Base APP’s surrender.

II. Base ecosystem’s new strategy

Base’s new strategy consists of three pillars: trading, payments, and artificial intelligence agents.

In 2026, this specifically means three things: win trading, win payments, and win agents.

Trading means every kind of asset. Tokenized stocks, meme coins, app coins—whatever you want to trade. Payments means globally universal stablecoins, for individuals and businesses. Agents mean accelerating all of this, because crypto is the native currency of computers, and AI will create tens of trillions of new economic participants.

The Friend.tech mass social token craze in 2023 led the crypto industry to believe SocialFi could become the next user-growth entry point. But as the hype faded, users couldn’t actually enter the crypto market just because they had on-chain identities—while trading turned out to be more compelling instead. Therefore, Base ultimately concluded that attracting users into the crypto industry may not be achieved through social means, but through trading channels.

Payments are the second core of Base’s new strategy. Stablecoins are gradually taking on cross-border payments, enterprise settlement, and personal transfers. In May last year, Base announced x402. This payment protocol supports instant stablecoin payments directly via HTTP. According to data on the x402 official website, in the past 30 days there were 75.41 million transactions with a total transaction value of $24.24 million. There were 94,060 buyers and 22,000 sellers. Base wants users to make global payments with stablecoins; enterprises to settle with on-chain dollars; and AI agents to complete trades autonomously using on-chain assets. Compared with SocialFi, payments have clearer commercial value.

The third direction in Base’s strategy is AI agents. Pollak believes that AI will create “tens of trillions of new economic participants,” and since crypto is the native currency of computers, AI agents inherently require on-chain financial infrastructure. Coinbase Developer Platform launched AgentKit, which is currently Base’s most core development tool for entering the AI agent space.

As described on Coinbase’s official website: AgentKit is a toolkit that enables AI agents to interact with blockchain networks, providing secure wallet management and comprehensive on-chain capabilities. It is built on the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP) SDK and provides everything needed to create autonomous agents capable of executing complex on-chain operations.

In sum, Base’s future positioning has shifted from bringing one billion users into crypto through social, to attracting users into the on-chain financial system with trading, payments, and AI agents.

III. Does Base APP still have a future?

Over the past two years, Base APP has tried to build an on-chain super app independent of Coinbase.

In Pollak’s vision, Base App would be more than just a wallet—it would be a new entry point connecting social, content, the creator economy, and on-chain assets. Time has proven that this idea cannot be realized smoothly.

As Base App is brought back into the Coinbase ecosystem, the future direction of the Base ecosystem aligns even more closely with Coinbase’s own strengths: finance, trading, and payments.

Base App is shifting from a product aiming to build an “on-chain social entry point” to serving as an entry point for Base’s financial ecosystem.

As for Base itself, compared with other L2 projects, Coinbase backing is its biggest advantage: it sits on a stable user base, mature fiat on-ramps, compliant trading platforms… While Base is an L2, its ambitions go beyond being “just an L2.” After Base’s strategic shift to trading, payments, and AI agents, it will need to face payment-network competition driven by stablecoin issuers; crypto financial infrastructure players such as Hyperliquid and Solana; and competitors in the AI agent track, where dominance has yet to be determined.

Competition in TPS and fees may be diluted across the L2 track—liquidity will decide who rules.

As Pollak pointed out:

“We’re seeing stablecoins, prediction, perps, tokenization advancing in real time, and I only expect it to accelerate. Right now, I’m focused on getting one billion people onto the chain by making global finance actually run. In terms of applications, my focus is to build Base into a global financial blockchain.”

If it succeeds, Base could become an important on-chain financial entry point for Coinbase. Even if it fails, Base will only fade among many L2s.